Are We All Doomed?

People watch as coverage of an ICBM missile test is displayed on a screen in a public square in Pyongyang, North Korea, in July.CreditKim Won-Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Bari Weiss

Aug. 10, 2017

This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. The guest writer of today’s newsletter is Bari Weiss, an editor and writer in the Opinion section. You can sign up here to receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.

“I don’t want to be alarmist, but we’re all going to die.” That’s the sunny sentiment Stephen Colbert opened his show with on Tuesday evening, after a day in which the American president promised North Korea that if it continued to threaten the United States the Hermit Kingdom would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Remember Hillary’s line? In my view, it summed up the best argument against voting for Donald Trump: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”

As we’ve learned over the past six months, we can’t even trust him with his own mouth. The threat Mr. Trump issued was entirely improvised, according to Times reporters. But for the vast majority of Americans who still believe that words have meaning, the president’s ad-lib was “alarming,” as Evelyn N. Farkas rightly points out in The Times, “since the world has witnessed the horror of atomic bombs used by the United States on Japan at the end of World War II.”

So what can be done? Do we East Coasters need to send for our friends and family in California and Alaska (not to mention Guam and Seoul)? Susan Rice, a former Obama advisor, argues in our pages that it’s not too late for the U.S. to reduce the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons. “While we quietly continue to refine our military options, we can rely on traditional deterrence by making crystal clear that any use of nuclear weapons against the United States or its allies would result in annihilation of North Korea,” she writes. In other words, more of the same. Or in other other words: There is no good solution.

That’s the overwhelming (and terrifying) consensus offered by various Pyongyang watchers. The most comprehensive of these is the Atlantic cover story this month by Mark Bowden. Best to read his piece with a stiff drink.

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If you aren’t cowering under your desk, consider reading this short piece I wrote about Dwayne Betts. When Betts was 16 years old, he was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking. “I don’t have any illusions that the penitentiary is going to help you, but you can get something out of it if you want to,” said the judge who meted out the sentence. Doubtful that judge could have imagined that Betts would go on to earn a degree from Yale Law School. The father of two is exactly the kind of lawyer the Connecticut bar should be celebrating. Instead, it’s denied him admission. What does his case say about our criminal justice system?

On the news. Rex Tillerson’s efforts to downplay the president’s rhetoric won’t relax tensions with North Korea, argues The Atlantic’s Krishnadev Calamur. “The secretary of state might assure the U.S. public that he has the issue covered and that they can indeed ‘sleep well at night,’ but it’s Trump’s words that are being heard in Pyongyang and the rest of the world.”

Raiding former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s home for documents suggests that Robert Mueller’s Russia probe “has advanced, has identified specific potential crimes, and is zeroing in on key evidence,” Alex Whiting writes in Just Security. “It should now be plain that Mueller will use all the investigative tools at his disposal to fulfill the task that he has been assigned.”

David Leonhardt, the regular author of this newsletter, will return Aug. 28.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is an editor and writer in the Opinion section.